Children are the key stakeholders for shouldering and shaping societies towards sustainable development. However, an index assessing children development in the context of sustainable development is missing. To address this challenge, the framework of the Sustainable Child Development Index (SCDI) considering environmental aspect was firstly proposed and the indicators were collected and screened regarding data availability. As the following study, the research target of this study is to complete the establishment of the SCDI by selecting the representative indicator set, designing the normalization and aggregation methods, and determining the SCDI scores for countries. First, the 23 representative indicators addressing the five themes health, education, safety, economic status and environmental aspect are selected based on correlation analysis and the trade-off between the number of covered countries and considered indicators. The representative indicators are normalized according to the defined reference points regarding the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) and then aggregated into the SCDI for the 137 countries. The SCDI scores are classified into four levels (very high, high, medium and low) to group countries’ progress towards achieving sustainable child development. The results show that a great regional inequality on sustainable child development achievement exists. European countries, especially Nordic countries, express their superiority in sustainable child development. On the contrary, 95% of the assessed African countries are evaluated as countries with medium and low achievement. Additionally, some OECD countries, e.g. Australia, Italy and Turkey, are evaluated as medium sustainable child development countries due to their weak performance in the theme environmental aspect, e.g. freshwater vulnerability and renewable energy consumption. Moreover, the correlation analysis of the SCDI, Human Development Index and Child Development Index shows that the SCDI can be applied as a complementary assessment to the existing development indexes in order to provide a more comprehensive evaluation on sustainable development by regarding children perspective and addressing relevant topics of sustainable development, such as environmental aspect and safety. Accordingly, the application of SCDI can contribute to establishing more comprehensive strategies on child as well as sustainable development policies, and to inform the condition on child development to stakeholders.
